Vaewolf: Damn the Darkness: The Prophecy's Promise (Hearts of Darkness Book 3) (31 page)

“Sorry, I got carried away, Caitlin.”

He hated burning out of control. Suspecting what he did about Dylan was reason enough for his distraction. It wasn’t an excuse as much as an explanation for his internal thermostat going haywire.

“Never apologize for wanting me so much or being what you are. Besides, your body heat will feel great when I’m cold.”

“Yeah, well, it’s June in Louisiana.” He turned a wet cloth over and adjusted another. A low snarl defined his disgust with himself. “Are you all right?”

“It doesn’t hurt any more than a sunburn. But I wish you’d learn how to control your body temperature with a little more regularity so we could cuddle.”

“Tonight isn’t going to be one of those nights. Sorry.”

“We’ll do some research and figure out how to control this little side effect.”

“That might be impossible since I’m one of a kind.”

Jackson was the only known Lycan vampire hybrid, literally two factions at odds within one body. The fact his late mother was the daughter of the former wolf council leader made him heir apparent, but being half vampire forced him to prove his allegiance to both groups, time and time again. Now his body was at odds with his two halves. The cold vampire and the hot Werewolf.

“Stop thinking so loud. I’m fine.” Caitlin said. One cool cloth covered the worst of what felt like a severe sunburn. The second one across her back felt soothing, and the third between her thighs had her thinking about sex again. “Thanks, that feels sooo wonderful.”

“Sorry. I warned you I had a short fuse, today. Next time believe me.”

“I’ll live.”

“Ha, ha.”

“Having you inside me is worth every minute of this, Jackson. You a have no idea how good you make me feel. You’re a miracle.”

“Bull shit,” he snapped.

“You are.”

“Right. You would think so, being a vampire and all.”

“I know so,” she said. “You’re a miracle to me, even if you don’t want to be for the vampire population at large.”

“Vampires thought they’d lost the ability to procreate years ago, so my conception was nothing short of a miracle to my father’s people and a nightmare for my mother’s. When she died in childbirth with my sister, the pain of losing them both sent my father to ground. I was alone.”

“Dylan, was there for you—”

“It’s what makes all this impossible...”

Caitlin knew this was all so hard for both men. Two alpha males, each whose destiny rested with her. She ran the back of her fingers down Jackson’s cheek. “What are you thinking?”

He sneered at her. “Did you think you could distract me? What do you think? Tell me about Dylan.”

~~~~

He knew something. She wished she did.

“There’s nothing to tell. Where’s all this sudden concern and the burning interest in Dylan coming from, tonight?”

“Nothing really.” Jackson shrugged an “it’s nothing to me, if it’s nothing to you” casual rise with one shoulder, but his voice revealed something else—a deeper concern. “You were reading his old emails when I came in. You looked sad...”

“No sadder than you do when you think of him, I’m sure.”

He paused as if he wasn’t sure how to continue. “I said we’d talk later. It’s later. Answer the question.”

She let out an exasperated breath. “One minute he was here and the next…gone. What did he find that would keep him from me—us?”

“I think he suspected something before he left. But are you sensing anything from him now?” Jackson asked.

“Just a light touch in my mind earlier like a blip on a radar screen that quickly blinked out.”

“I’m trying to get a fix on him, too and I can’t. Both of us can’t be wrong. He’s back. But where?” He dragged his hand through his hair. “It’s so frustrating—having so much power and being unable to channel it.”

Born with both vampire and Lycan traits, the upside were the powers—the down side were the vulnerabilities. Together his traits made him stronger than any Lycan or vampire, other than the ancients, but not all his traits were fully developed.

“I can’t get a bead on him.” Jackson’s psychic powers, and his mental ability to push thoughts into someone’s head were still in the developmental stage. “But your heightened vampire GPS should be picking him up if he’s nearby.”

“Either he’s gone again or blocking our connection. I’m getting nothing…but we could go out hunting.”

Jackson looked at the clock and grinned. “We could.” They had plenty of time before dawn and after, he could deal with the sun, even if Caitlin couldn’t yet.

Her burned skin looked better, but seeing the burns on her sent a bolt of guilt through him.

He had a tolerance to heat and the sun with minor susceptibility to either. A further sign of his immaturity was his inability to control his gifts. If he overheated, he had to shift into his wolf form to keep from being severely burned. That often proved inconvenient, depending where he was or what he was doing. Since the wolf’s internal thermometer was naturally higher than a human’s or a vampire’s, sex sometimes took him too close to that heated edge for his comfort and, in this case, his partner’s. His lack of control and the skin-to-skin contact had burned Caitlin.

“How do the burns feel?”

“What, this?” She tried to brush his question off as if it was nothing, but he growled at her for an answer.

“Better,” she quickly answered, “no worse than a bad sunburn.”

“At times like tonight, I hate that my touch is like a hot branding iron against your skin. Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“What and miss your howl of satisfaction when you came? Never, cur.” She tickled him and chuckled when he jumped. . He loved her husky voice and the sound of her laughter.

“Fortunately, my healing ability will take care of the burns before daybreak.”

“They are looking better.” He looked them over. “But it doesn’t make them any less painful at the moment. Does it?”

“No, but the cool cloths helped. I’m going to take an herbal bath, and they’ll be better by the time I get out.”

Caitlin was right. Her skin, still tight as a sunburn from his body heat, would heal quickly in an herbal bath. Besides, she could relax and meditate a bit—focus on finding Dylan.

Jackson nodded and stepped up to her. “It’s true. Your natural healing abilities will work more effectively with herbs in cool water. Better yet, my blood will guarantee it.”

He tore his wrist open, pressed it against Caitlin’s lips, and ordered, “Drink,” forcing her to take what he offered by holding her head to his wrist. Her mouth opened in surprise, forming a little “o” before she closed her eyes and drank. She didn’t resist past the first surprised sip.

His blood would heal her, and before she finished, he noticed it already eased the burns and relieved his anxious mind.

~~~~

Thirty minutes later, feeling almost euphoric after his orgasm, Jackson looked up from the TV. Caitlin looked revived and completely healed, but she was naked and tempting, forcing him to look aside.

“What’s up with you?” she asked, and dressed without looking at him. “You just came off a full moon, yet you’re behaving like you have moon madness.”

“You’d think so by my recent reactions,” he spit out, completely disgusted with himself. “Sorry…we know Dylan is out there somewhere, and we need to find him.” Jackson dropped his head against the headboard. “If I could just focus.”

Caitlin cupped his face in her hands and kissed the tip of his nose. “Relax. We’ll focus together.” She gripped both his hand in hers and sat next to him on the bed. “Close your eyes. See if you can link with me. I’ll open my mind and look for his mental thread. If he’s close by it should work.”

For Jackson, the time of the full moon was particularly troublesome. He walked a fine edge regularly without the added burden of knowing Dylan was around and wouldn’t face them. He didn’t need to add any more complications to his life. The vampire side of him still had less control over the Werewolf in him than he’d like. Both were predators by nature—the Werewolf compelled to fuck, hunt and kill his prey, to feed—the vampire compelled to fuck, hunt and drink human blood, to feed without killing. Unlike the werewolves, vampires were forbidden to kill their source of dinner.

One night a month he locked himself away until the moon madness eased. If the Werewolf kept dominating, he wondered if he’d have to start jailing himself more often. Fuck, he hoped not. That one night was already torture. He had to discover what was happening to him, and he figured Dylan had answers.

“There!” Caitlin turned to her right and jumped. “I caught a mental image, Jackson. It’s Dylan.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I’m not from around here. It’s a...bar. Music. Vampires and humans…others. Rustic?”

Jackson laughed and scooped her up in his enthusiastic embrace. “Rustic? That’s a polite word for the place.” Jackson gave Caitlin a soft kiss, then pulled on his leathers and boots. “Grab my shirt and the keys. I know where he is.”

Chapter Forty One

The Bayou Bar

“Where the hell have you been?” Jackson roared.

He brushed his thick arm over the table knocking the empty beer pitcher across the room. Grabbing Dylan with one hand, he lifted him out of the chair like a rag doll. People scattered, and the bartender raised both hands for peace.

Nobody said “boo” when they saw Jackson’s extended three inch canines, except some scraggly vampire wannabe who risked mumbling, “I heard the wolves were restless, but don’t that beat all?”

Caitlin grabbed Jackson’s massive forearm in an attempt to hold him back, but he continued growling, nose to nose with a glassy-eyed Dylan.

“Everything’s fine,” she reassured the bartender and the others, holding up her hands. “Brothers.” Doubtful expressions intensified, and finally she saw what they saw and understood their skepticism. The men looked nothing alike—one as dark as midnight, the other as fair as sunlight. She shrugged tilting her head and asking, “What can you do?”

Jackson growled and glowered at Dylan, who was upright solely because of his brother’s tight grip. Dylan objected with a growl of his own and a drunken sneer at Caitlin.

Jackson’s sudden lack of concern for Dylan was a different matter altogether.

First, Caitlin stepped in front of Jackson, blocking him from Dylan, then tried to free his arm from Jackson’s grip. She stepped between them and placed a hand on both men’s arms. Gripping them as tightly as she could, she held them apart. They could have tossed her off like a flea, but she banked on the fact they couldn’t/wouldn’t hurt her. Even if they were stronger, she’d been well trained. Leverage worked well against strength every time.

Jackson finally released his hold and Dylan to drop back into his chair with a thud before she could reach him.

Whew! Caitlin backed off once they were all seated. Immortal or not, all that testosterone was giving her a headache.

Caitlin lifted Dylan’s chin and stared into his face. “My God, you’re stinking drunk.”

Dylan turned his head from her to Jackson and smiled. “I am. I did it. I was aiming for ‘stinking’ drunk, and I think I’m there.” He slurred his words and his eyes rolled back in his head. Then the three-hundred-year-old vampire’s fell to the table, smack on his face, cracking the six-inch cypress.

Caitlin gasped, and Jackson smiled for the first time in a long time.

“Oh, that had ta hurt,” said another guy, huddling at the back table.

The sound of Jackson’s big, booming laughter didn’t sound as rusty as Caitlin expected. She waited a heartbeat then couldn’t resist joining him. Wiping tears of laughter and relief from her eyes. Every time she thought she’d stop, the laughter surfaced again.

Something finally stopped her laughter. Picking up random thoughts from the bartender and a few of the other patrons, one from Dylan came with a visual that pissed her off and shook her confidence. Caitlin kept her own thoughts blocked as she stared back at the fair haired female vampire watching the encounter with Dylan. She shot daggers at Caitlin with her glare.

Drunk or not, faithful or not, Dylan was back...and all hers. The last part of that thought, she shared with the woman, and then smiled with her full complement of fangs—an alpha bitch challenge if there ever was one.

“What’s going on?” Jackson noticed the exchange and flipped his head in the vampire’s direction. “Are you contemplating a cat fight?”

“Uh, no. No cats involved.” Caitlin turned her attention back to Dylan ignoring the other part of his question. “How did he do it, Jackson? I thought we couldn’t get drunk.”

“Check his pockets. According to Dylan my father shared a lot of ancient secrets with him. I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t one of them. Some herbs allow alcohol to absorb into our systems.”

“Wha-la!” Caitlin pulled a few packets of herbal looking substances out of Dylan’s shirt pocket. “Apparently, he intended to get like this.”

“Let me see those,” Jackson held out his hand and sniffed one. “Yup, this makes it possible.” He held up another one. “This is the antidote. Here, pour this in his mouth. I want him sober for questioning, and I have no idea how long it’ll take to work.”